Faces

“I’d better get back to work after this—I’m running a lab!” Eric Kandel said as he crossed Twenty-seventh Street, on the way to an art gallery. Kandel, who is eighty-four, won a Nobel Prize in 2000 for his studies of the molecular mechanisms of memory. “Now I’m working on how memory is perpetuated,” he said, describing his research at Columbia medical school, where he is a professor. “I’m studying how you remember your first love experience for the rest of your life.” What did Kandel, who has prominent ears, large round glasses, and a halo of white hair, remember of his first love experience? “A great deal!” he said. “It was fantastic!”

He went on, “It happened when I was eight years old, with our housekeeper, Mitzi, in Vienna.” Kandel was born in Austria and fled Europe for Brooklyn when he was nine; he celebrated his ninth birthday just days before Kristallnacht. “I was in bed with a fever, and Mitzi came into the room and sat on the bed, and exposed her bosom to me, and encouraged me to touch her. And I was extremely moved by this. And she said, after a minute or two, ‘We’d better stop or else you will get pregnant.’ And I said, ‘How can I, a boy, get pregnant?’ And she said, ‘It’s very easy. The doctor puts some talcum powder on your belly button, your belly button opens up, and the baby comes out.’ ”

Kandel was in Chelsea to meet with Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, who, since 1974, have been compiling a multivolume catalogue raisonné of the works of the Expressionist painter Chaim Soutine (born 1893 in a Lithuanian shtetl; died 1943 in Paris). Tuchman and Dunow curated a new Soutine show, at the Paul Kasmin gallery, to which Kandel contributed a catalogue essay exploring how neuroscience can help us understand our reactions to the artist’s work. “In addition to visual and tactile interactions, there are also powerful emotions—sometimes pleasure, but often fear, anxiety, and uncertainty—that are recruited in our brain by Soutine’s torturous, asymmetrical, and existential images,” he writes.

“Neither Esti nor I have spent a week in all our grown lives without discussing Soutine,” said Tuchman, who has an Alex Trebek mustache and very white teeth, and who was wearing a black leather jacket and sunglasses inside.

“Forty years later, I still love Soutine,” Dunow, who wore a billowy black ensemble and red shoes, added.

Sixteen oil paintings, all privately owned and not for sale, were propped on foam blocks, against Kasmin’s white walls. Kandel, who had on a red bow tie and a navy suit, stalked around the gallery, before stopping in front of “Maternity” (c. 1942), which, in thick impasto, depicts a young mother, her face warped, with a large, limp baby spilling off her lap. “From a scientific perspective, you can use this one painting to point out several things,” Kandel said. “One is why Soutine, and other Jewish artists, focus on portraiture. Faces are extremely important for social interactions—for finding our partner, for expressing emotion.

“Moreover, the brain represents faces in a different way from that in which it represents any other object.” He pulled a pen from his breast pocket. “If I take this pen and turn it upside down, you would still recognize it as a pen. But if you take a face and you turn it upside down you have enormous difficulty in recognizing it. We have a special machinery for handling the face; there is an area in the inferior temporal cortex that is six face patches, and they respond to different aspects of the face. And if you distort the face, if you push the eyes farther apart or closer together, the cells go wild. This is what cartoonists and caricaturists pick up on—you’d recognize a cartoon of Nixon better than a portrait of the President.” He leaned in toward the painting. “Her left eye—you don’t even know whether she has an eye! Clearly, she has a lid.”

Not everyone has responded with enthusiasm to the notion that science can account for our seemingly intuitive interactions with art. But Kandel argued, “Look, if you know something about the biology of love, does that detract from the love experience, does it make it any less wonderful?”

“Soutine had two long-term relationships”—one with an ex-wife of Max Ernst—“but he was a loner,” Dunow said. “Some people thought he was boorish and brutish and sullen. Other people said he was an incredibly elegant man. He read Pushkin, poetry.”

“Modigliani liked him a great deal,” Kandel added.

“When he died, he was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery,” Dunow said. “Picasso was one of the few people who came to the funeral, and it was known that Picasso hated funerals.”

“But everything about him is unreliable,” Kandel said. “Chagall, in retrospect, was a publicist. Every time he went to the bathroom, he wrote a note.”

Kandel recounted how, when he and his wife of fifty-eight years, Denise, who is also a Columbia professor, were on their honeymoon, at Tanglewood, Denise tried her hand at portraiture, with her new husband as subject. “I swear to you, it’s spectacular,” Kandel said. “It’s a little bit Soutine-ish. It’s distorted, it’s Expressionist. It’s not uncomplimentary, but it’s not necessarily complimentary.” Had Denise made Kandel pose? (Soutine always painted directly from life.) “I don’t remember!” Kandel said. “I’m not sure she’ll remember. I’ll ask her tonight.” ♦

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